Summer of Hamn

—Selected for the In the Margins Book Awards 2024 Nonfiction Recommendation List

"With his latest work of graphic nonfiction, Chuck D uses his art and hip-hop rhymes to show how the US has been held hostage by gun violence and a growing sense of hopelessness . . . A focused, fresh, urgent text filled with pictures worth 1,000 words and rhymes worth thousands more." —Kirkus Reviews, Starred Review

IN SUMMER OF HAMN, legendary hip-hop artist Chuck D takes on gun violence with rhythmic, inventive writing and passionately raw art. He has long spoken out against gun violence, including how it intersects with rap and hip-hop culture. Summer of Hamn is the bound journal Chuck D carried with him in the summer of 2022—a summer marked by a particularly high rate of gun death.

In these pages, victims are memorialized, politicians are skewered, and vehement pleas to eradicate gun violence are made. Jaw-dropping statistics (40% of all personal guns in the world are owned by US citizens; there are 100 million more guns in the US than there are citizens) intersect with poetic reflections ("Another mall shooting seems normalized in Columbus / Raining outside in Ohio / Raining inside folks panic / Inside hearing shots bust"), all written in Chuck's hand over vibrant, utterly original, neoexpressionist ink and watercolor art.

This book is the follow-up to STEWdio the debut trilogy on Chuck D's Enemy Books imprint, in which he invented a new medium—the "naphic grovel"—a bound journal brimming with his observations and reflections of current events in both art and prose. Summer of Hamn is the second release on the imprint.